Once again, we find ourselves at a Wikipedia stub page for a woman in music, for composer Jessie Furze. Though there’s a pretty sizeable collection of works listed, there’s not much in the way of biography. Jessie was once again a composer and pianist, and dedicated much of her career to writing educational music. But a quick look in the BNA lands us straight with Jessie in Norwood, for a while now I’ve been bumping up against the musical world of the London suburb – with Streatham not far behind. This is about as much intrigue as I need to lure me into finding more information out about these amazing women, so if you fancy a ride into newspaper lane, jump in.
Continue reading “Following threads of women composers: Jessie Furze”Following threads of women composers: Harriet Maitland Young
As should by this point be becoming clearer, I like a wild goose chase. In this case, a very short Wikipedia article on Harriet Maitland Young (1838-1923) got my attention, a composer about whom very little is known other than her mention in the Women’s Work in Music (1903). The Wikipedia article lists four operettas by Young, and notes she is buried in Camden. So if we dig a bit more… what do we find? I think you’ll know by now I can’t resist a mystery adventure.
Continue reading “Following threads of women composers: Harriet Maitland Young”Avril Coleridge-Taylor and the Royal Albert Hall
This summer Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s music will be played at the Proms for only the second time, with her piece ‘The Shepherd’ receiving its debut as part of the Great British Works Prom on the 4th August. She is a recent Proms arrival, her orchestral work ‘A Sussex Landscape’ was first performed there only last year. Yet despite this long neglect of her output, Avril was no stranger to the Albert Hall as a venue for her own work (and yes, the Proms only moved to the RAH in 1941). The Coleridge-Taylor family had a special connection with the concert hall.
Continue reading “Avril Coleridge-Taylor and the Royal Albert Hall”‘The Boxer’ Simon & Garfunkel (1969)
I am sat in Preston Guild Hall, enraptured by the lyrical brilliance of the guitar duo my Dad has taken me to see. I can’t be more than 12, I could be at Madison Square Gardens or the Hollywood Bowl (except I don’t yet know they exist because I live in Lancashire). I am here to see the incredible lyrics of two men singing in close harmony with the unique sound of gentle guitar accompaniment, listening to songs that are surely going to change popular music.
Continue reading “‘The Boxer’ Simon & Garfunkel (1969)”Program Notes for Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Comet Prelude’
This is a copy of a programme note I wrote for Croydon Music and Art’s recent performance of this extraordinary piece. I’ve added some images to the story so you can see a little more! It was written to help children and young people understand more of the context about the music they were playing.
Avril Coleridge-Taylor was born in South Norwood in 1903 and lived in 66 Waddon New Road in Croydon. She was the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the famous Black British composer, and so she grew up in a house of music: he was a successful composer and conductor not only in London’s music scene but around the world. This happiness was very brief, aged just 9, Avril experienced the tragic and very public loss of her Dad, who died from pneumonia aged only 37. She spent much of the rest of her life navigating his legacy and fighting to preserve it, while building her own career as a composer and a conductor.
She began composing at 12, and over her lifetime produced an array of music – some of which under the name of a man – much of which has been unperformed. She conducted at the Royal Albert Hall when she was 30 and formed the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra in 1941. With her brother she worked hard to secure her dad’s legacy: while successful in his life, his impact began to be forgotten. It’s only in recent years his full musical contribution has been reassessed, and with that, Avril’s herself.
This piece, the Comet Prelude, was written at least partly on board a plane in 1952 – Avril was a passenger on the first ever jet flight, the De Havilland Comet, which would carry regular commercial passengers from London Heathrow to Johannesburg, South Africa. The beginning of the jet age was a time of great excitement about being able to reach far off destinations. It seems like she was brought onto the flight especially to compose while on board the plane – to show how thrilling air travel be. The plane stopped at several destinations to refuel including Rome, Beirut and Khartoum, stops which influenced her writing of the score.
Avril was going to Cape Town to conduct for the South African Broadcasting Company, something which at the time in the country was limited to white people. This was because of a policy that enforced the racist separation of people to give white people the most power, a system called Apartheid. Though she performed in South Africa for two years, when the South African government realised that Avril had a Black father and a white mother, her bookings were cancelled.
Understanding Avril and what she was doing in South Africa isn’t straightforward, and it is difficult to draw clear conclusions about it. [NB. Leah Broad and Samantha Ege have a fascinating piece on this here] Some have suggested she wanted to pass as white in order to change the government’s opinions, others that she wanted to build a career she wasn’t able to have in the UK due to sexism. We just don’t know, but what we do know is that the experience changed her, and she went on to support many other Black musicians in her later career, for example, she formed and led a choir of performers of colour in the UK in 1956. It’s worth remembering she was a composer and a conductor, and that she wrote this piece to conduct it.
Music Data and GCSEs
Over the last few months I’ve been building a dashboard of music education data in the UK, understanding different aspects of the available datasets. Today on Twitter/X, there was a question from Anita Holford about what percentage of 16 year olds in England continue with music after Year 9.
A lot of this is hard to explore – the Ofqual data is not sortable by age, so you can’t see what age people are when they do Grade 6 music exams for example, this means identifying quite a tight frame for what we can (currently) know. I should also start by saying this post is written in a personal capacity and any mistakes are mine and mine alone!
We could discover what percentage of the Year 11 population have been entered into GCSE or in vocational qualifications though even if we can’t pull ABRSM or RSL stats. So we could start to get some sense of what the continuation level in ‘formal’ music education settings at this level, even if we can’t add in the Ofqual data by a comparable frame work.
If you’ve spent some time in DfE data, you’ll know about ‘build your own data tables’ in https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/ – it’s hugely useful to find particular sets of background data. So we can find the total number of Year 11s in the UK for 22/23. I’ve also added French as an example other subject.
England only data
| Total Number | |
| Number of Year 11s [Headcount] | 611,578 |
| Total number of pupils entered into GCSE Music | 29,867 |
| Total number of pupils entered into vocational music | 15,777 |
| Total number of pupils entered into GCSE Maths | 614,371 |
| Total number of pupils entered into GCSE French | 125,438 |
It seems fairly drastic, I’ve checked the Joint Council of Qualifications figures, who list in England in this same year 29,732 sat GCSE music.
Plotting the trend over the last decade is not pretty. I don’t have the percentage figures for all these years, this is the general history of the qualification. (note it doesn’t drop to nothing – the left axis starts at 29,000.)
This could just be a collapsing school population (without the percentage to check it by), so it’d be sensible to look at the population estimates here – I’ve looked at this two ways – firstly I’ve gone with the OfNS population estimates for each year. There is a track in the first few years, but then it all breaks around 2018. The population rises but the proportion taking GCSE music (now of the whole population, not the actual Year 11 stats as before)… tanks. (note this is a two axis graph with two sets of labels)
I’ve looked at the headcount using the DfE data as my second method here. Note this set starts a little later, and again, it isn’t pretty. (Be careful, the point they look like they meet is just the two axis points crossing, it’s not suddenly a mini triumph of gcse music).
All of this to say, there are some very big problems here in the ongoing sustainability of the qualification.
But the data along can’t tell us why this is happening, and crucially, it’s not a full picture though – until we can know how many young people are learning music in other settings, enjoying guitar lessons or playing Yousician and so on, we really can’t say that the non-GCSE music takers aren’t taking part. They just aren’t taking part in ways that look like GCSE music.
Next steps would be looking at LA level music data – is GCSE music falling in particular areas? Across particular demographics or types of school? If there are areas where GCSE music is prevalent, what’s happening differently? Can we identify schools that are bucking this trend and find out why they?
NB (I’ve made these charts with a variety of google sheets behind the scenes work and chatgpt’s plotting functionality)
Eva Jessye
(b. 1895, Coffeyville, Kansas – 1992)
Choir director, music director, activist, composer, journalist. Led the official choir of the March on Washington (1963)
Jessye’s musical leadership during the 1920s and 1930s placed her at the helm of some of the most important significant productions during this period, on Broadway and in Hollywood. She was a music director for King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929), the first Black cast sound film (though Vidor was white), and her choir, the Dixie Jubilee Singers appeared in the film. She was accepted to university aged 14, because she wasn’t allowed to enroll in high school education as a Black woman. She met and was inspired by Will Marion Cook, and after graduation worked as a high school teacher. In this article I’ve found some of her remarks in interviews and coverage of her work.
Continue reading “Eva Jessye”Margaret Rosezarian Harris
Margaret Harris (1943 – 2000) is slightly better remembered for her work as a conductor than her contemporary, Joyce Brown. She had a long association with the musical Hair and conducted over 800 performances, on Broadway and as MD for its national tours .
There’s much more to Harris’s career, and retracing newspaper coverage of her work reveals interviews with her, and the prospect of several Broadway shows she was never credited for. Footage of Harris conducting and playing the piano has also been found, and shared here for the first time.
Continue reading “Margaret Rosezarian Harris”‘I have a reservoir that hasn’t been tapped’: uncovering the groundbreaking work of Joyce Brown
Joyce Brown (1920 – 2015) – is regarded as both the first Black woman to conduct any Broadway show (in 1965) and to open a new show as conductor (1971). Her contribution was phenomenal: to music and music education; to building up Black community on Broadway; and to making opportunities for Black musicians at every stage of their career was phenomenal. Yet when she died in 2015, there was no obituary that recounted her achievements on the pages of a national newspaper. To date, she has no Wikipedia page, and Google turns up only a few articles that lay out her achievements.
This article builds on the little that is known about her by searching through digitised newspaper records of her work. It lays out Brown’s career alongside her own words, retraced from the many interviews she did during her career.
Continue reading “‘I have a reservoir that hasn’t been tapped’: uncovering the groundbreaking work of Joyce Brown”“But no one is doing the reading!”: exploring journal articles as lecture prep
In my earlier post I explored how to read and use academic articles, with some clear ways in for students. This time I wanted to slightly switch tactic – and put some questions for lecturers to think about in addressing why they are setting reading in the first place. Then there are some strategies for how we might find new directions instead of simply setting one or two articles a week.
Continue reading ““But no one is doing the reading!”: exploring journal articles as lecture prep”
Sarah Whitfield 
